In June 1883 the Hardys moved to Dorchester, to lodgings in Shire Hall Lane. Two months later, accompanied by Edmund Gosse, they attended a church service at Winterborne Came, conducted by clergyman, poet and Hardy’s former teacher, William Barnes. (Barnes had retired from school mastering two decades earlier in 1864, when he had been offered the living of Winterborne Came-cum-Whitcombe – the rectory of which stood not half a mile from Max Gate.)
Unable to find a house in Dorchester, Hardy purchased a plot of land from the estate of the Duchy of Cornwall, situated a mile out of town to the east, on the road to Wareham. Here, he would build a house of his own; or rather design it and arrange for his brother Henry to construct it. The dwelling would be called ‘Max Gate’: the name being derived from that of the inhabitant of a nearby toll gatehouse, a Mr Mack. During the digging out of the foundations for Max Gate, some Romano-British graves containing urns and skeletons were discovered.
In June 1884, the day after Hardy’s 44th birthday, he went to see a performance of the circus in nearby Fordington Field. That month and the following found the couple again in London, meeting artists and writers, including the painter Edward Burne-Jones. In July Hardy, having returned to Dorset, visited the Dorchester Assizes, and in August he attended a performance of Shakespeare’s Othello, performed in the town by strolling players. August also saw Hardy and his brother visiting the Channel Islands, taking the steamer from Weymouth. In December he attended the New Year’s Eve bell-ringing ceremony at Dorchester’s church of St Peter, where he observed that the tenor bell was worn and its ‘clapper battered with its many blows’.1
Early in 1885 Hardy was invited to Eggesford, Devon, by his friend Lady Portsmouth, who together with her husband encouraged Hardy and Emma to move to Devonshire to be near them. Emma would have gone willingly, Hardy records, as this was the county of her birth. However, it was impracticable as the Dorchester house was now nearing completion.2
On 19 April Hardy completed the writing of his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. It had taken at least a year, during which time he had been ‘frequently interrupted’.3
The Mayor of Casterbridge was, in Hardy’s own words, ‘more particularly the study of one man’s deeds and character’, and in this way it differs from his other novels.4 That man is Michael Henchard – a powerful, dominating person who towers above the other characters in the novel but, nonetheless, is ultimately ‘defeated by his own defects’.5
Henchard, a journeyman (hired workman) hay-trusser, arrives at Weydon Fair in search of work. Here, while out of his mind through drink, he puts his wife Susan, together with their child Elizabeth Jane, up for auction. Mother and daughter are ‘bought’ by a wandering sailor called Newson. When he emerges from his drunken stupor, Henchard bitterly regrets his action and vows to abstain from drink for a period of twenty years. He settles in Casterbridge (Dorchester) where he prospers as a corn merchant and ultimately becomes the town’s mayor.
Years later, Susan appears in Casterbridge. She believes her husband Newson to be drowned and is therefore in need of support for herself and her daughter. She and Henchard are reunited and they remarry, but Henchard does not realise, and Susan does not apprise him of the fact, that their original daughter, Elizabeth Jane, is dead and this Elizabeth Jane is, in fact, her daughter by Newson. On a previous business visit to Jersey, Henchard had met one Lucetta Le Sueur, whom he intended to marry. He writes to inform her that this is now no longer possible.
When a young and able Scotsman, Donald Farfrae, arrives on the scene, Henchard appoints him as his business manager. However, jealous of Farfrae’s success and of his popularity in the town, Henchard subsequently dismisses him. Susan dies, but leaves a letter for her husband informing him of the truth about Elizabeth Jane. Henchard, who knew no better at the time, has already told Elizabeth Jane that it is he who is her father and not Newson, as she had previously understood.
Lucetta arrives from Jersey and takes Elizabeth Jane on as her companion. But instead of paying court to the widower Henchard, Lucetta transfers her affections to Farfrae, which makes the former even more jealous of the Scotsman. Henchard threatens Lucetta with revealing the truth about her former attachment to him, and thereby blackmails her into promising that she will marry him. He comes to grief, nevertheless, when sitting as a magistrate he is exposed in court as a one-time wife-seller. His credibility is now lost, leaving Lucetta free to marry Farfrae, which she does. The weather now takes a hand.
In Hardy’s own words, ‘the home Corn Trade … had an importance that can hardly be realised’.6 The entire population depended on the harvest and ‘after mid summer they [the farmers] watched the weather-cocks as men waiting in antechambers watch the lackey’.7 With this in mind, Henchard purchases enormous quantities of grain. If the weather is bad and the harvest poor, as he believes, then the price of grain will rocket. However, the sun shines, the harvest is an excellent one, the price plummets and he becomes bankrupt. And the final indignity for him is when Farfrae purchases his former house.
When a certain ‘Royal Personage’ passes through Casterbridge and Henchard makes a foolish exhibition of himself, Farfrae – now mayor of the town in Henchard’s stead – is forced to intervene. Henchard challenges Farfrae to a fight to the death, but relents, having got the Scotsman at his mercy. Henchard also relents about making use of some love letters once sent to him by Lucetta (who is now pregnant by her husband), and instead of taking revenge on her and Farfrae, he agrees to return them to her. The plan misfires and the love letters become public knowledge. The shock of witnessing the townspeople parading an effigy of herself and Henchard through the streets causes Lucetta to miscarry and die.
When Newson reappears, having ‘come back from the dead’, Henchard lies to him and tells him that Elizabeth Jane is also dead; although Newson subsequently discovers the truth. Henchard then disappears from the scene, revisiting Casterbridge only briefly for Elizabeth Jane’s marriage to Farfrae. He then dies in an abandoned house in the presence of his former employee, Abel Whittle.
Described as a ‘smouldering, volcanic fellow’, Henchard’s pattern is ‘to cheat himself of success, companionship, happiness, love’. He is ‘a confusing mixture of good and evil’, but despite his ‘negative qualities’, he also possesses ‘courage, generosity’ and ‘forthrightness’.8 This is a man ‘driven by inner destructive forces beyond his comprehension and control’.9 In short, Henchard illustrates the Darwinian Theory of Evolution (with which Hardy was familiar), in that being unable to adapt, he is therefore incapable of surviving. Also, Henchard’s bitter experiences in life bear out the notion held by Hardy’s mother, Jemima, that there is always a figure standing in our path to ‘knock us back’. In this case, the figure was Henchard himself.
As usual with Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge is rooted in fact. There was a case in real life of a man selling his wife, and a ‘Royal Personage’ – namely Prince Albert – did actually visit Dorchester in July 1849.
There is usually a rock solid and utterly dependable character in each of Hardy’s novels, and in this case it is Elizabeth Jane, who continues to demonstrate her concern for Henchard, despite all, right to the bitter end. If Hardy had ever had a daughter, how he would have loved her to be like Elizabeth Jane.
The Mayor of Casterbridge was published on 10 May 1886 by Smith, Elder & Co.
April 1885 found the Hardys again in London, viewing paintings at the Royal Academy and attending a party given by Lady Carnarvon, wife of the 4th Earl, at which they met Conservative politician Lord Salisbury. When June came, it was time to transfer the furniture from their Dorchester lodging house to their new house, Max Gate: described as an unpretentious, red-brick structure of moderate size, standing on a 1½-acre plot of land. Hardy was soon to plant in excess of 2,000 trees around it. This would afford greater privacy, together with protection from gales. One of the first visitors to Max Gate was Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, who was then living in Bournemouth in a house called ‘Skerryvore’. In the drawing room of Max Gate, Hardy would write his next novel, The Woodlanders.
A ‘careful observer’ described Hardy at this time as being ‘below the middle-height’ (he was actually 5ft 7in tall), of ‘slight build’, with a ‘pleasant, thoughtful face, exceptionally broad at the temples and fringed by a beard’. He always wore a moustache and his eyes were ‘a clear, blue-grey’.10
In October 1885 William Barnes related to Hardy how, when Prince Louis Napoleon of France was resident in England, he had visited the Darner family at nearby Winterborne Came House. Hardy had already written one book set in Napoleonic times –The Trumpet Major. One day, his fascination with the period would lead him to write another: The Dynasts.
The termination of the year 1885 made Hardy ‘sadder than many previous New Year’s Eves have done’. He asked himself whether the building of Max Gate was ‘a wise expenditure of energy’, but hinted that there may have been darker forces at work which had undermined his spirits.
In London once again, in the spring and summer of 1886, he spent time in the British Museum’s Reading Room, and attended the House of Commons where the Home Rule Bill for Ireland was being debated. In May he describes meeting a ‘Hindu Buddhist’ who spoke English fluently, was remarkably well educated and was a ‘coach’ of the Theosophical Society (which professes that knowledge of God may be gained by intuitive insight into the nature of the divine). He went to his club, observed criminal trials at the law courts, and with Emma attended dinners at various private houses to which they had both been invited.
October 1886 found Hardy in an aggrieved frame of mind, and he wrote to Edmund Gosse describing how he had suffered previously at the hands of certain critics; in particular, the ‘anonymous’ ones who chose not to reveal their names. The ‘crown of my bitterness’, he says, ‘has been my sense of unfairness in such impersonal means of attack’. Such attacks mislead the public into thinking that there is ‘an immense weight of opinion’ behind the criticism, which one such as he, Hardy, can only oppose with his ‘own little solitary personality’.11 Two months later, he makes use of this word again in a letter to journalist William H. Rideing, in which he says: ‘My life when a boy was singularly uneventful & solitary.’12 But he does admit that there is a positive side to the ‘slow, meditative lives of people who live in habitual solitude’, for such lifestyles render ‘every trivial act … full of interest’.13
That same month, William Barnes died at the age of 85.
It was in the study above the drawing room at Max Gate that Hardy wrote The Woodlanders. However, the plot caused him considerable anxiety and he complained of a ‘sick headache’ and ‘a fit of depression’ in which he seemed to be ‘enveloped in a leaden cloud’.14
In The Woodlanders, many of Hardy’s favourite themes resurface. They include the problems encountered when two persons of different social status fall in love, and when two men compete with one another for the hand of one woman, together with the problems men and women may have of understanding one another. Hardy also stresses that qualities such as loyalty, devotion and steadfastness in a male suitor, ought always to triumph over wealth, property and title.
In the novel’s preface, Hardy explains that the book is principally concerned with ‘the question of matrimonial divergence, the immortal puzzle [of] how [a couple are] to find a basis for their sexual relation[ship]’. But why did Hardy use the word ‘sexual’ – an excessively daring one by the standards of the time – when he might have preferred, instead, ‘matrimonial relationship’? From one of the foremost wordsmiths of the day, this surely was no accident, and use of the word ‘sexual’ undoubtedly reflected his own preoccupation with the subject.
In the preface to The Woodlanders, Hardy explains how a problem may arise when a person ‘feels some second person to be better suited to his or her tastes than the one with whom he has contracted to live’. This may be viewed on the one hand as the ‘depravity’ of an ‘erratic heart’. But on the other hand, no thinking person, concerned with the question of ‘how to afford the greatest happiness to the units of human society during their brief transit through this sorry world’, would be content to let the matter rest here. How are these statements to be interpreted, as far as Hardy’s own personal life is concerned?
Hardy had fallen in love with Emma, perhaps at first sight; he had returned from Lyonnesse with ‘magic’ in his eyes; he had courted her over four and a half long years, and now here he is in the preface to The Woodlanders, and only a dozen years after his wedding, admitting in so many words that he regrets the whole affair and wishes that he had married somebody else. (It should be stressed that whatever Hardy’s thoughts were about other women, he remained faithful to Emma all his life.)
Finally, in the preface to the novel, Hardy makes mention of the religious aspect of marriage. Is it to be seen as a divinely sanctioned ‘covenant’ – ‘What God hath joined together’ – or simply as a secular ‘contract’ between two people?
The story of The Woodlanders begins with estate-owner Mrs Charmond demanding to have the locks of hair of Marty South – a poor girl who is assistant to Giles Winterborne, cider-maker and forester. Her objective is to make a wig out of it for herself. Straight away, an upper-class person is behaving as if she owns the body, if not the soul, of one whom she considers to be beneath her.
Timber merchant George Melbury has a daughter, Grace, to whom he has provided a good education. Giles Winterborne is devoted to Grace, and it has always been assumed that one day the two of them will marry. However, Grace’s father intervenes and tells her that she is worthy of someone better, ‘a man who can take you up in society, out into the world’.
An incident which reveals Hardy’s impish sense of humour occurs when Giles invites the Melburys to a ‘gathering’, at which Grace discovers a slug in her ‘leaves of winter-green’. When the guests have departed, Giles’ servant reassures his master that the slug was well cooked. Says he: ‘I warrant him well boiled. God forbid that a live slug should seed on any plate of victuals that’s served by Robert Creedle!’
Edred Fitzpiers arrives on the scene to take up the position of local doctor. When Giles forfeits some properties which he owns and becomes less eligible on this account, Melbury points his daughter in the direction of Dr Fitzpiers.
Mrs Charmond’s carriage and Giles’ waggon meet head to head in the lane. When Giles is unable to reverse, Mrs Charmond sees this as insubordination and spitefully announces that she intends to demolish his cottage as part of a road-widening scheme – another typical example, to Hardy’s mind, of the callous behaviour of which the upper classes are capable. (The Woodlanders also contains a detailed description of man traps: spring-loaded devices made of iron, designed with teeth to lacerate the flesh and crush the bones; they were used by gamekeepers on country estates to catch poachers. Although the use of such devices had largely died out by the mid-nineteenth century, Hardy would have seen them as yet another example of oppression – barbaric brutality, in fact – by those who should have known better.)
Grace and Fitzpiers duly marry, but when he tells her that it is not appropriate for them, as a couple, to associate with such lowly people as her brothers, she tells her father that she feels the doctor is ashamed ‘of us, of me’. When Grace discovers that Fitzpiers is a liar, and that he has been philandering with Mrs Charmond, she and her father realise that the marriage has been a great mistake. However, Melbury doubts that his daughter will be permitted to divorce Fitzpiers because, says he: ‘Your husband has not been cruel enough. The law will leave you as Mrs Fitzpiers, ‘till the end of the chapter [her life].’
Here, Hardy shows his distaste for legal statutes which condemn those such as Grace to lives of misery.
Fitzpiers accompanies Mrs Charmond to the Continent. When he returns, looking for Grace, she leaves home and flees to Giles’ hut. Giles, mindful of her reputation as a married woman, spends several nights sleeping outdoors in the open, whereupon he succumbs to a sickness and dies. He is mourned by Grace, and by Marty South who also loved him. At Grace and Fitzpiers’ final meeting, the doctor, now contrite, asks Grace what she feels for him. ‘Nothing’ is the answer.
Hardy completed The Woodlanders on 4 February 1887 and recorded in his diary that he felt relieved at having done so.15 This relief surely reflects the fact that, vicariously through the characters of the novel, he has brought the problems of his own marriage out into the open, which is a catharsis for him. And as his emotions finally boil over, what he writes – albeit in measured tones – is an expression of frustration, anger, bitterness and regret, engendered in him by years of marriage to Emma.
Surprisingly, and despite all their differences, Hardy and Emma left Dorchester on 14 March 1887 for London, en route to Italy. Here, they visited the cathedrals of Pisa and Milan, the Colosseum in Rome and the graves of the poets Shelley and Keats; all indicative of Hardy’s reverence for both good architecture and poetry. Venice was the city which he appears to have enjoyed the most. In Florence they visited the tomb of Elizabeth Browning, poet and wife of Robert, who had died in 1861. They also visited Lucy Baxter, daughter of Hardy’s former mentor, the late William Barnes, who had settled in Florence after her marriage.
Emma, in her (surviving) diaries, reveals some of the tensions which existed between herself and Hardy at this time. Referring to her husband, she says: ‘Tom very vexed. Dyspeptic before and worse now’ – ‘Tom has taken another little stroll by himself ’ – ‘Tom … had an altercation [with the father of a family] about seats’ (this was on the train journey from Italy to Paris, where Emma admitted to siding with the father of the family in question against her husband). When she says, ‘Little shoe-black [presumably a reference to a child whose job it was to polish the shoes of visitors] persistent at Forum [in Rome] Sunday morning, [I] broke my umbrella beating him off ’, this may be construed as the sign of her contempt for what she described as the ‘working orders’. Hardy, no doubt, would have been horrified and disgusted by her behaviour in this respect.16
Back in London in the spring of 1887, Hardy and Emma trod the well-known path to society gatherings, and again met the poet Robert Browning, with whom they discussed their recent holiday in Italy. Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee took place on 28 June and they went to see the procession which included vast numbers of royalty.
In August 1887, in a letter to Edmund Gosse, Hardy told of the weeks and months of ‘despondency’ which he had experienced ‘in byegone years’, the most recent bout being ‘several years ago’. This he attributed to his ‘stomach’ and eating habits, but alluded to the fact that other factors may have been involved. In the autumn, Hardy was toying with ideas for plots for his forthcoming epic drama, The Dynasts. Meanwhile, his reading of the poets and the Classics continued unabated.
In the spring of 1888, Hardy and Emma again sojourned in London before returning to Paris; this time to the Salon, to the races at Longchamps, and to an exhibition of drawings and paintings by French writer Victor Hugo.17 On their return, Hardy called upon Lady Portsmouth and, being always one with an eye for a pretty female face or figure, remarked upon how well her ladyship’s ‘black, brocaded silk’ fitted her.
On 4 May 1888 Hardy’s Wessex Tales – a collection of short stories – was published by Macmillan. They included The Three Strangers, in which the hangman meets his victim-to-be (an escaped convict) in a shepherd’s cottage; The Withered Arm, where a woman invokes magic to cure a malady; and A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four, where Napoleon (with whom Hardy was always fascinated) is engaged in a reconnaissance of the Wessex countryside. In The Distracted Preacher Hardy makes use of anecdotes told to him by his grandfather, Thomas I, in regard to smuggling on the ‘Wessex’ coast.
In mid-July Hardy and Emma return to Dorchester, where Hardy makes a note of interesting stories he has heard for possible inclusion in future novels. Examples include the tale of a man who took ‘casts of the heads of executed convicts’, and that of a young lady who got married wearing ‘a dainty pair of shoes’ – these shoes had been previously thrown at her by another man, a shoemaker, whose love she had spurned; he had made them for her as a present.
In London in 1889 Hardy was fascinated by Turner’s use of light at an exhibition of his paintings at the Royal Academy. He also compared the techniques of Botticelli and Rubens in their depiction of the ‘flesh’, Vis-à-vis the ‘soul’; the fact that both these men were portrayers of the female form par excellence would not have been wasted on him. As always, he and Emma attended church services, concerts, plays and, of course, society events.
In a letter to poet and essayist John Addington Symonds in April, Hardy asks ‘whether we ought to write sad stories, considering how much sadness there is in the world already’. He concludes that the justification for doing so is that ‘the first step towards cure of, or even relief from, any disease (is) … to understand it’. This may then provide an escape from the worst forms of sadness in real life.18 This may be interpreted to mean that for Hardy, the writing of novels and poems with a sad theme acted as a catharsis in respect of his unhappy life with Emma.
At the end of July 1889, the Hardys returned to Max Gate, where Hardy settled into the daily routine of writing what would be his next novel: Tess of the D’Urbervilles. This was not, however, to be a straightforward project. The first two magazines to which he sent the manuscript rejected it on the grounds that it was ‘improper’, and it was only after Hardy had laboriously edited it, removing parts or all of various chapters, that it was finally accepted by the editor of the weekly newspaper The Graphic.
Hardy, despite the labour of writing, still found the time and energy to record his thoughts and feelings on those subjects which he found intriguing; for example, religion. He had been searching for God for fifty years, he confessed, ‘and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him’.19 He also found time to write to Hugh Thackeray Turner, secretary to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, objecting to the proposed demolition of the church in the village of Stratton, near Dorchester; in his view, ‘some judicious repair’ was all that was necessary.20
At Easter 1890, Hardy visited the grave of William Barnes at Winterborne Came. In May, when he and Emma were again in London, he sent the manuscript of A Group of Noble Dames to The Graphic, which agreed to serialise it. This was a collection of short stories – for the background of which Hardy drew heavily on The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset by the Revd John Hutchins (first published in 1774). For the plots of the stories, however, he relied on ‘the lips of aged people in a remote part of the country, where traditions of the local families linger on, & are remembered by the yeomen & peasantry long after they are forgotten by the families concerned’.21
A year later, A Group of Noble Dames was published, in book form, by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. of London.
What did the critics have to say about A Group of Noble Dames? In the words of one, it was a ‘pageant of disastrous marriages, confessed and unconfessed adulteries, complicated illegitimacies, sudden deaths, suspected crimes [and] bizarre cruelties … among the Wessex gentry of some generations back’.22
At the end of June 1890, Hardy said he was ‘getting tired of investigating life at music halls and police courts’, which appears to have been his principal preoccupation during that season in London. Attendance at the latter would probably have provided material for his stories, as well as satisfied his somewhat morbid curiosity; whereas the beautiful actresses and dancers with their ‘lustrous eyes and pearly countenances’, which he would have seen at the former, would doubtless have afforded him light relief and titillation.
When, in that year of 1890, Emma’s father John Gifford died, Emma left London to attend his funeral in Devon. Hardy did not accompany her. Thereafter, Hardy generously arranged an annuity for Emma’s niece and nephew, (Ethel) Lilian (Attersoll) Gifford and her brother Gordon. That August, Hardy and his brother Henry went on a visit to Paris together.
It may have afforded Hardy some amusement to consider that he, an outspoken critic (through his writings) of the upper classes, was now coming into contact more and more not only with London society, but also with the gentry of Dorset. For example, in January 1891 he attended a ball given by Mrs Brinsley Sheridan (a descendant of Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan) at her home, Frampton Court, Frampton, near Dorchester. To this, Emma arrived on horseback; horse riding being a favourite pastime of hers.
In the spring of 1891 Hardy was elected to the Athenaeum (a London gentlemen’s club), from the balcony of which he saw the German emperor, Wilhelm II, pass by.
Despite his literary success, Hardy was still unable to afford a second home in London, and he and Emma were obliged to find rented accommodation for their annual spring sojourns in the capital. At a luncheon at Mary Jeune’s (Lady St Helier, wife of a distinguished judge) in July, Hardy mentions sitting between ‘a pair of beauties’, the one with ‘violet eyes’ being ‘the more seductive’, while the other was ‘more vivacious’.23
In September Hardy and Emma visited Scotland and many of the places depicted by Sir Walter Scott in his novels. In November he gave his opinion on whether eminent men of letters should be awarded national recognition. The problem, as he saw it, was that while ‘the highest flights of the pen [by an author] are mostly the excursions and revelations of souls unreconciled to life, [the] natural tendency of a government [was] to encourage acquiescence in life as it is’.24
In that year of 1891, Emma’s mother died. It is not known if Emma attended the funeral.
When Hardy began a new book, it was his habit firstly to select a brand new pencil with which to write it, and secondly to relocate to a different room in the house. So, for Tess of the D’Urbervilles, he moved out of his old study and into a new one, situated at the rear of Max Gate with a window facing west.
The story commences with Parson Tringham, antiquary, addressing Jack Durbeyfield, a ‘haggler’, as ‘Sir John’, and informing him that he (Durbeyfield) was descended from the ‘ancient and knightly family of the D’Urbervilles’. (It will be recalled that the Hardys liked to think of themselves as being descended from the ancient ‘le Hardy’ family of Jersey.) Hardy describes Jack as a ‘slack-twisted fellow’ whose ‘times [of work] could not be relied on to coincide with the hours of requirement’ – another example of Hardy’s wit.
When Durbeyfield’s wife informs her husband that a great lady by the name of D’Urberville is living at nearby Trantridge (Pentridge, near Cranborne), they decide to send their daughter Tess to pay the family a visit, with the purpose of claiming kinship to them.
At the D’Urbervilles, Tess meets Alec, the young man of the house, who confesses to her that his family are not genuine ‘D’Urbervilles’ but that they obtained the title of this ‘old, extinguished family’ simply by purchasing it. Nevertheless, Alec’s mother offers Tess a job managing her poultry farm. The old lady is deeply attached to her fowls and, despite being blind, is able to recognise each one of them individually by their comb, beak and claws.
On hearing from Tess that her family’s horse has died, Alec generously provides them with a replacement. He then takes advantage of Tess while she is sleeping, forcing himself upon her. She falls pregnant, and after being mistress to him for a period of four months, she returns home to have his baby. When the vicar arrives to baptise the infant, Tess’s father forbids it – his family having suffered such disgrace. When the child dies, Tess informs the vicar that she herself had previously baptised it. Nevertheless, the vicar refuses to allow it a Christian burial. Here, Hardy is venting his anger against prejudice and religious dogma.
Tess then finds employment with Farmer Crick, described as a ‘kindly man who has his own pew in church’. Among his employees is Angel Clare (Hardy having obtained the name ‘Angel’ from a memorial plaque in Stinsford church), a parson’s son who wishes to become a farmer. When in the dairy the butter refuses to set, this is taken to mean that someone is in love – Hardy’s appreciation of folklore – and in this case the loving couple are Tess and Angel. Angel proposes to Tess, she accepts and they marry.
When Angel confesses to having had a brief relationship with an older woman, Tess forgives him. However, when, despite her mother warning her against it, Tess confesses to having had a similar relationship with Alec, which resulted in the birth of a child, now deceased, Angel takes this as proof that she is the ‘the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy’ and departs for Brazil. Tess returns home. She now has to endure jeering and being referred to as a ‘trollope’. Here is Hardy railing against hypocrisy.
Tess now endures great hardship working in the fields, uprooting turnips and feeding wheat into the threshing machine which works, remorselessly, from dawn to dusk. Meanwhile, she resists the overtures of Alec, who tells her that had he known her circumstances he would have done his duty by the child. Aware that Tess’s father is ill and that her family are liable to be evicted, Alec offers his help, but is again rejected. Alec also offers to marry Tess, but she declines because she does not love him. Finally, Jack Durbeyfield dies and the family is rendered homeless.
Angel returns from Brazil to find letters of desperation from Tess which have not been forwarded. He goes looking for her, eventually finding her in Sandbourne (Bournemouth). He asks her forgiveness, but she tells him it is too late. Tess is now living with Alec, who has been good to her family and won her back to him. A distraught Angel catches the train home, only to have Tess jump into the carriage and join him. She has murdered Alec.
The couple flee; Angel determined to save her from the forces of the law. However, at the ‘pagan temple’ of Stonehenge she is captured.
In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy’s heroine’s brief dalliance with Alec sets her on a course of destruction, culminating with her being hanged for murder at Wintonchester (Winchester). Her second ‘mistake’ was being honest. She wanted to have no secrets from Angel, who must know the truth about her past.
Tess showed immense qualities of endurance in resisting Alec, who, by proposing marriage, offered her an easy escape from a life of toil and hardship. But she did not love him and remained true to Angel, even though he had forsaken her. The forces which crushed Tess were enshrined by an establishment which condemned adultery and ‘bastardy’. For this, Tess was punished by being jeered at and by being denied a Christian burial for her child. The impact of this on her life would not have been so catastrophic had it not been for Angel’s intolerance in assessing her ‘lapse’ to be of greater significance than his. In short, Tess was literally hounded to death by the combined harshness of the establishment and the bigotry of those around her.
The notion that they are descended from a distinguished family leads the Durbeyfields to ruination, as they make desperate but futile efforts to live up to the ‘knightliness’ of their ancestors. As for Hardy, The fact that this is a recurring theme implies that what he perceived as his lack of ‘pedigree’ was a source of deep regret to him. This, of course, is a paradox, in one who invariably championed the cause of the lower orders of society.
Tess provided Hardy with a vehicle for yet another outburst against the victimisation of the weak and oppressed, perpetrated by the upper classes and enforced by a callous and impersonal legal system. Tess acknowledges this, in an almost masochistic way, when, having struck Alec on the mouth, she invites him to punish her. ‘Whip me, crush me,’ she cries. ‘I shall not cry out. Once victim, always victim, that’s the law.’ And the scene where Tess is hanged was, for Hardy, reminiscent of a similar scene: the hanging of Elizabeth Brown at Dorchester, which he had witnessed personally in the year 1856 when he was 15.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles was published in late November 1891 by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. The novel became a talking point throughout the land and was quickly translated into several languages, including Russian. Despite this, many libraries refused to stock it. Its review in The Quarterly was to offend Hardy deeply. The article, he said, was smart and amusing, but at the expense of truth and sincerity. ‘If this sort of thing [criticism] continues,’ he said, there would be ‘no more novel writing for me’.25
On 20 July 1892 Hardy’s father died. Like Horatio in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he had in his lifetime taken suffering and fortune ‘with equal thanks’. His last request had been for a drink of water from the well, which led him, when he had tasted it, to say: ‘Now I know I am at home.’ He was buried in Stinsford churchyard, and it was Hardy himself who designed his tombstone. From then on, the family business was continued by Hardy’s brother, Henry.
That October also saw the death of Tennyson, whose funeral in Westminster Abbey Hardy attended.
The following May, in 1893, Hardy and Emma visited Ireland, where in Dublin they met Florence Henniker (sister of Lord Houghton, the Lord Lieutenant, and wife of Arthur Henniker-Major, an army officer). Although Florence was fifteen years Hardy’s junior, the pair were to strike up a long friendship and correspondence. The Hardys were also present in the Irish capital for Queen Victoria’s Birthday Review, held on the 24th of that month.
June 1893 found Hardy in Oxford, at a time when commemoration proceedings were taking place to honour the university’s founders and benefactors; the purpose of the visit was to gather material for his next novel, which would be entitled Jude the Obscure. In August Hardy and Emma spent some time in Wales. In November he wrote two poems, and on Christmas Eve at Max Gate he and Emma received carol singers who, with their lanterns, stood under the trees and sang to the accompaniment of a harmonium.